An organization, such as a corporation, a partnership, or other business, may generate and/or otherwise accumulate a large body of data, information, and knowledge. Such data, information, and knowledge may be referred to as corporate data. Corporate data may contain text, codes, numbers, and other information. Persons at such organizations may find it useful at times to organize and present such corporate data to entities in reports. Various applications may be used to generate reports based on corporate data, including spreadsheet tools such as Microsoft Excel® (developed by Microsoft Corp. of Redmond, Wash.), Google Spreadsheet of Google Docs™ (developed by Google Inc. of Mountain View, Calif.), and IBM Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets (developed by IBM Corporation of Armonk, N.Y.), reporting services such as SQL Server Reporting Services (developed by Microsoft Corporation), Crystal Reports™ (developed by SAP Business Objects of San Jose, Calif. and Paris, France), and Oracle® Reports (developed by Oracle Corporation of Redwood City, Calif.), and business intelligence clients (e.g., IBM Cognos Oracle® Hyperion, and SAP Business Objects™).
Problems exist with reports that are generated based on corporate data. Such reports may be visually dull, as they primarily show columns of raw data. Furthermore, such reports may be difficult to be searched by a user to visually locate relevant data (e.g., a user may have to read/scan all the text of the report), and may not be memorable to users when such reports lack visuals and/or further descriptive information. As such, reports based on corporate data typically lack richness and have limited usage.
Currently, generators of reports can manually add visuals and further data to reports. However, this adding is a long and tedious manual process. Google Spreadsheet includes a feature called “Google Lookup” to add data to a report. However, in order to do so, Google Spreadsheet causes the user to explicitly build a query to obtain the data, and to manually attach the query to the spreadsheet.